ENTER2018 eTourism Conference presentation

1. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 1
DMOs’ Facebook Success Stories:
A Retrospective View
Lidija Lalicica
, and Stefan Gindlb
a
Department of Tourism and Service Management
MODUL University Vienna, Austria
lidija.lalicic@modul.ac.at
d
Department of New Media and Technology
MODUL University Vienna, Austria
stefan.gindl@modul.ac.at

2. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 2
Aim
The study investigates:
•The FB presence of the top 22 destination as listed by TripAdvisor 2017
(TripAdvisor, 2017) and their FB-marketing strategies.
•The benefits of Facebook-based marketing activities with consumer
engagement measurements.
•Through a data-driven approach, the analyses are based upon activity
downloaded from the public Facebook pages for their entire history of existence.
•The social media analytics, in this case for Facebook, will support the
measurement of success or failing online media strategies for destinations.

3. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 3
For practitioners
• Identification of the best practices for successful Facebook presence,
• Destination can benchmark their Facebook presence and improve
where necessary.
• Provide a set of guidelines enabling destinations to enhance their
current online social media strategies.
• The study provides an overview how to systematically identify
trends, integrate the most effective engagement tactics and monitor
online communities as a part of their online marketing strategies.

4. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 4
• Social media marketing
– To enhance consumer engagement (Habibi et al., 2014)
– Resonance, animation, experiential appeals, social causes
– Challenges to deal with: effectively use social media, grow markets with a creative vision,
involve consumers in telling their stories, and reinvent the mass media model.
– Non-existence of a universal measurement of ROI
– Destinations to positioning techniques, various according to countries
– Little empirical research of DMO FB marketing
• Facebook engagement
– Engage, integrate and immerse consumer into an active brand community (Jahn & Kunz, 2012)
– 1 FB consumer leads to 20 additional visits to a brand website (Harris & Dennis, 2011)
– Increased knowledge gained in FB group leads to more engagement
– Attention seekers, devotees, entertainment chaises and connection seekers (Hodis et al., 2015)
– Positive reactions to conversational information (Kim et al., 2015)
– Visual content shows more engagement (Coelho et al., 2016)
– Humor, posing questions and pictures (hotel industry) works (Kang et al., 2014)
– DMOs only 1 year time span, or only airlines of hotels in rural areas (Pesonen, 2011; Leung et al., 2013).

5. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 5
Method
• Destinations included: “Visit London”, “Paris je t'aime”, “Visit Barcelona”, “I Amsterdam”,
“Visit Budapest”, “visitBerlin”, “Visit Tenerife”, “This is Edinburgh”, “Visit Madeira”,
“Visit Dublin”, “Visit Greece”, “Turismo Roma”, “Incredible Crete”, “Prague.eu”,
“Istanbul CVB”, “St Petersburg Guide”, “Visit Lisboa”, “Visit Florence”, “Santorini”,
“Visitcorsica”, “Rodos (Rhodes)” and “Visit Malta”.
• Own develop tool by Stefan Gindl to scrap all information from FB API’s
Variables:
• frequency (absolute frequency - total number of posts during the observation period.),
• types (video, image, text, link, event, note, music and offer)
• publication times of posts (i.e., the hour preferred for posting.)

6. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 6
FB Activity
Total: 95,535 posts
Active DMO: 20,400 posts
Least active DMO: 365 posts
Total: 80,506,867 reactions
Active DMO: 43,203,212 reactions
Least active DMO: 3274 reactions
Average post receives 800 reactions

7. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 7
Page Activity Per Post Type Reactions:
86% photos
9% links
4% videos

8. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 8
Post Activity per Hour
DMOs Fans

9. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 9
Final Remarks
• 10 years, brands have the possibility to engage with their consumers
through the creation of a Facebook brand page; a longitudinal
retrospective analysis
• Building up a loyal fan base takes time and shows to be challenges on
FB.
• DMOs are advised to strategically choose their post type, as shown
this is of utmost importance to engage fans in various manners.
• Firms need to take the time of posting into account as users tend to
respond at certain times only.

10. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 10
Future Research
• Inclusion of detailed metrics that give deeper insight into user
engagement by measuring loyalty or analyzing the content of the fan
comments.
• The content, type or the length, and the moment of the posts can be
an interesting variables to explain the success rate of a post.
• User profiles including
• A comparison among different industries and usage of Facebook as
an engagement tool will shed further light on the different posting
activities and user behaviors.